It's not going to happen, but you can easily imagine the guys in the "PC vs. Mac" commercial picking up a BlackBerry and an iPhone.

The dorky PC guy in the ill-fitting khakis would be dutifully answering emails from the boss while pecking away at the little keyboard and wiping sweat from his brow.

The cool Mac dude would glide the iPhone from his jeans, watch a YouTube video while taking a phone call from some hot chick and geo-locating the nearest happening nightclub.

Well, it's fun to envision seeing that on TV, but the iPhone vs. BlackBerry showdown is not quite that simple.

The big news is that Canadian businesses now have a choice of ways to keep their employees connected.

The hype surrounding the July 11 launch of the 3G iPhone by Rogers Communications was massive.

Flagship stores like the one at Yonge and Dundas in Toronto sold out almost instantly.

The fact that some people stood in line all night in the rain (or paid someone to hold their place) is vivid proof of the device's "cool factor."

The 3G iPhone can certainly do some things a lot better than the BlackBerry:

* Almost everyone reports that the iPhone's web-browsing experience, with features like automatic resizing, is exceptional. Think of a scaled-down version of your computer screen, as opposed to the BlackBerry's little display that was really made for reading emails.

* It has a touch screen, and, especially for younger users, that's a much more intuitive way to interact than a conventional keyboard.

* It has sensors (like the Nintendo Wii) so, for example, if you rotate it 90 degrees when it's in calculator mode, it flips between a business and a scientific calculator.

* The iPhone integrates phone features like Visual Voicemail.

According to the Apple website, this "plays your messages in any order you want, just like email."

* It's got a GPS and the smarts to make good use of it

* It's also an iPod - the hottest tech product since some caveperson started selling sticks to make fire.

* Apple is taking a very open approach to letting developers write iPhone applications, and splitting the proceeds. There are already more than 500 of these, from games to a prescription drug database, at the iPhone App store.

The BlackBerry still seems to lead in terms of getting email to you quickly and reliably, having great battery life, and, my in-the-know friends tell me, having excellent security - good enough for the government folks.

This device also benefits from years of field testing and experience. It's safe and reliable.

To paraphrase the old adage about IBM, "nobody ever got fired for buying BlackBerries."

Right after the iPhone announcement, I was the guest on a radio phone-in show that invited calls from people who were switching from BlackBerry to iPhone.

A small business owner from Red Deer said he was breaking his contract with Telus to buy an iPhone from Rogers, which currently has the only Canadian network that supports the iPhone.

His main reason was the ability to easily run web-based applications on the iPhone. He manages his people with salesforce.com, and feels that it will be a lot easier to use that application on the iPhone.

This caller also noted that since he was a businessman, price wasn't a consideration, and also said that the break fee to get out of his current contract was "actually a lot less than people think it is."

The cost of the iPhone in Canada has been a source of concern for more price-conscious customers.

In fact, an anonymous person started an online petition aimed at bringing down the prices of the Rogers data plan. It was submitted to the security guard at Rogers headquarters on July 14, bearing 57,086 electronic signatures of protest.

Why are Canadian wireless prices so high? Some bloggers have noted that Canada is a "wireless backwater" and that we are just used to being taken to the cleaners by our cellphone companies.

Blogger Andy Peatling created a comparison chart of the total cost of ownership of an iPhone over a three-year period in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K.

He used the 400-megabyte (MB) per month figure for Canada, noting that data is unlimited for the U.S. and U.K.

Still, Canada topped the cost list at $3,225, followed by $2,231 for the U.S. and $1,459 for the U.K. I haven't seen anyone disputing that these numbers are roughly accurate. We also get to suck back a longer term, 36 months, compared to our Yank and Brit cousins.

Because so many people are leery of that three-year lock-in, there were predictions that Canadians would take a wait-and-see approach to the iPhone launch. In what many feel is a devilish move, Rogers is offering a more respectable data plan, six gigabytes (GB) of data for $30 a month, versus the originally announced maximum of two GB/month, after which you pay by the megabyte. The catch is that you have to sign up by Aug. 31. The company clearly hopes to push the fence-sitters off their perch.

It's true that you can read a lot of email, even with attachments, and watch many, many YouTube videos with six GB. It's also true that there are other smartphones like the Nokia N95 and the HTC TyTN that have a similar look and feel to the iPhone.

But, let's face it, there's only one iPod and only one iPhone, and once you get it you will probably want to use it a lot.

If you have a solid business reason, or a chronic need to look like actor Justin Long (who plays Mac in the commercial), by all means indulge in an iPhone by Aug. 31.

But do remember that Long's credits include Dodgeball and Herbie Fully Loaded.

The PC dude (John Hodgman) comes from the far cooler The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and has written for the Paris Review and the New York Times magazine.

In life, as in technology, sometimes things aren't quite how they appear.

(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)